subtitles

flashlight wrote on 10/30/2002, 12:04 PM
I work for a foreign language translation company. We are often hired by video production agencies to either voice-over or subtitle videos in different languages. I often run into the problem of the video house wanting to do the subtitles at their facilities, which makes it dificult since all of the language people are at my office. Having non language people subtitle can be very dangerous.

This is what I would like to do (and hope is possible). When the english version of the video is done, I will dump it into vegas or get an avi file from the video house. Do all my subtitle work at my office. solo out the subtitle tracks and render them as an avi and send it to the video production agency. They would be able to take my subtitle avi with a transparent background, lay it over the top of the video and output the finished foreign version to whatever they would like (Betacam, DV, Webstream...)

I have tried to do this using the plain text with no background (transparent)tool. but when I render it, the background is black, not transparent. Is this possible? Most of the video houses I will work with do not have Vegas so I can't send them the vegas file.

Thank,
Al

Comments

flashlight wrote on 10/30/2002, 12:04 PM
By the way. This forum is awesome!!!!

Thanks everyone!
flashlight wrote on 10/30/2002, 12:09 PM
Also, the reason I like Vegas is 1) I can copy and paste the translations as they come in a document from our translators. and 2)Vegas can easily handle double-byte characters like Chinese Japanese Korean...

Most video places use avid and avid cannot do this. We have to output graphic files for the subtitles. What a bitch!
FadeToBlack wrote on 10/30/2002, 1:13 PM
FadeToBlack wrote on 10/30/2002, 1:19 PM
Sr_C wrote on 10/30/2002, 2:07 PM
I have never worked with subtitles before but here's my crack at this.

What if you put the subtitles against a blue or green background, then rendered your avi. That way, the video production company can overlay your file and take out the blue or green with their programs chroma keyer. resulting in just the titles appearing over their video. -Shon
FadeToBlack wrote on 10/30/2002, 2:11 PM
flashlight wrote on 10/30/2002, 2:48 PM
So there is no way to have the background be transparent? Does it always have to be a solid color?
SonyEPM wrote on 10/30/2002, 3:04 PM
Use text events with transparent background, render as uncompressed .avi.

This will give you an .avi with alpha (key) channel, and that can be easily keyed in any app that supports .avi with alpha.

Do you know what app your post house will be using to add the titles?

flashlight wrote on 10/30/2002, 3:39 PM
I work with a number of different post houses. some form of avid is probably the most common.

I just tried your suggestion. It worked great, except playback is a bit jittery.

I rendered as an uncompressed .avi.

I reimported the avi. Right clicked, chose properties, media tab, and selected "premultiplied" under the alpha channel. This got rid of the black background but playback was very jittery while the media was present. Playback smoothed out after the cursur passes. I only had two tracks and I have dual Athlon MP 1800 with 512mg of ram. I don't think it should be slowing down because of this.

But when I render it, it looks great.

Thanks,
Al
FadeToBlack wrote on 10/30/2002, 3:57 PM
flashlight wrote on 10/30/2002, 4:12 PM
If thats the case, then I am set. It works great. Thanks everyone. Like I said before, This forum Rocks!!!

Anyone need translations? www.thegeogroup.com

Peace,
Al